This game was reviewed using Version 1.6.2. Your experience on other versions may vary.

A solid "Pokémon-like" that does a lot both aesthetically and mechanically to stand out among the rest. It takes full advantage of the shift to 2v2 battles with lots of little mechanical tweaks, and it's all bundled in a package with fantastic art and music; though the early game can be a bit tedious and the story left something to be desired. Overall, though, it's a good game that got me to dip my toes back into a genre that I normally don't enjoy much anymore, and that's got to mean something.

I'll admit, I was on the fence about playing Cassette Beasts when my friend gifted me a copy recently. It wasn't due to any fault of the game, it's just that I've found myself enjoying the Pokémon style of "creature collector + turn-based JRPG" gameplay less and less as time goes on. Then again, I felt the same way when I tried a similar game called Monster Sanctuary a few years ago, and I ended up dumping 40 hours into it because the changes it made to this long-established formula made things much more interesting to me. Even though I didn't find myself playing it for quite as long, I can say that Cassette Beasts got me to set aside my growing disinterest in the "Pokémon-like" genre thanks to everything it does to set itself apart.

1. The most obvious change is that gameplay is all about double battles, and the available move pool is built to accommodate a ton of potential strategies for 2v2 play. Most of the main story battles had NPCs using gimmicks that I didn't even know were possible, and the frustration of some particularly annoying ones was offset by the satisfaction of figuring out how to counter (or just flat-out negate) all their little tricks. I thought this would wear on my patience since I'm more accustomed to 1v1, but I only got more into it as I progressed.
   
   
2. Monster type advantage is about more than just weakness/resistance to certain elements, as now almost half of all type interactions can debuff or even buff the defender—air attacks lower the damage of fire types, water attacks heal plant types, fire attacks melt ice types to turn them into water types, and so on. The only downside of this is that it's a lot to keep track of, so you may find yourself pausing the game to consult the type chart in your inventory more often than you'd like (P.S. if you can't find this, open your Ranger Notebook and then it'll present itself).
   
   
3. Instead of capturing the monsters, you record their data onto cassette tapes that let you transform into the monster yourself. This means that buffs/debuffs will carry over when you switch tapes since they're being applied directly to you, and your level is now tied to your character rather than the individual tapes. Equipped tapes do still earn XP, but this gets converted into stars that unlock new moves and move slots until reaching five stars lets you evolve the monster on the tape (note that not all monsters can evolve).
   
   
4. Moves are represented as stickers that can be peeled off and reapplied to compatible tapes at any time outside of battle. Not only does this make adapting to upcoming threats much quicker and easier, but it makes monsters you don't plan on using regularly still have value by providing you with new stickers for your main team.
   
   
5. Battles can be made easier or harder via two difficulty sliders in the settings: AI Smartness, which determines how much your opponent plays strategically as opposed to picking its moves randomly; and Level Scaling, which determines if low-level enemies scale up and higher-level enemies scale down to better match your current level.

The early game was where I had the most trouble, partly because fast travel can take a couple hours to unlock, and partly because of how the in-game economy works. Buying any healing items and even resting outside of town requires materials found in chests or from winning battles, and these are scarce at first; so I spent an annoying amount of time backtracking into town to replenish until the game got more generous with materials. Once it did, though, things were smooth sailing—mostly. The game was a little buggy when I was out in the overworld, which usually presented itself in the player/object physics misbehaving (e.g. being unable to jump out of the water, barrels flying off-screen/into the ground, etc.). Nothing game-breaking, thankfully, but your mileage may vary.

Outside of the main story, you also have some side goals you can pursue: you can try to record all 128 monsters, hunt bootlegs (basically shiny monsters with a different elemental type), pursue partners' side stories to improve your relationships with them, tackle raid bosses that spawn randomly around the map, and solve all manner of environmental puzzles for extra materials/stickers—plus some other stuff you unlock later on that I won't spoil. Basically all of it comes back to battling in the end, though, so players looking to see everything on offer might find themselves doing a lot of grinding to get there. Luckily, playing through the main story doesn't actually require much dedicated grinding, if any, but that's assuming you're at least dabbling in this side content and not just doing the bare minimum when playing.

Quick side note: you may have seen that this game recently got a multiplayer update, but I wouldn't pick it up with the expectation that it's now a full-fledged co-op game. You can hang out with up to 8 players in the same map, team up in raids, and trade with/battle against one another; but you can't help each other with story quests or fight non-raid battles together, so you're mostly just hanging out in the same world doing your own thing. It can make some completionist goals like farming raid rewards or hunting bootlegs go much quicker, but it would've been nice to have the option to run through the story with the friend that got me my copy in the first place.

Finally, it would be a massive disservice if I didn't talk at least a little bit about the game's artistic elements. For one, the visuals are great all around: monster designs are interesting, characters are distinct, the whole map and everyone in it is just pleasant to look at, and the designs of the main antagonists (no spoilers, promise) were really, really cool. The music is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the cassette motifs, a big focus of the experience; and the best way to convey my thoughts on that is by saying that I was ready to buy the soundtrack DLC within my first hour of playtime (which I later did). The writing, on the other hand, is the weakest of the three—far from bad, but underwhelming in comparison. The main story didn't really hook me personally, the partner stories were nice (Kayleigh confirmed best girl, fight me) but didn't get fleshed out as much as I would have liked, and there isn't much going on beyond those two. It gets carried by the art, music, and gameplay, so I didn't mind this too much.

You can expect the main story to take maybe 20-25 hours to beat, but you could easily spend twice that long if not more on the game's side content/achievements if you really wanted to, not to mention the DLC and future update content. I didn't try and 100% the game because, again, this isn't really my preferred genre; but the fact that I still saw it through to the end despite that says a lot to me about its quality. Overall, Cassette Beasts is an incredibly charming game that feels familiar enough to appeal to long-time Pokémon fans, but distinct enough to draw in players like me who don't get the same enjoyment from the genre as they used to.

For more game reviews, check out my Curator page!

I'm not a fan of the creature designs in this game, but I do like its mechanics, which show an example of the improvement that modern Pokemon should have.

excellent monster tamer. fantastic sound track and great story